Rift Magus Reborn: Rise of the Arcane Aristocrat by Sam Winton

Author:Sam Winton [Winton, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2024-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter nineteen

Evan was still a little pale and drawn, but I judged that if he could manage the work he’d undertaken while Adrian and I were away, then he could easily handle a few questions. So I started with the most relevant.

“Tell me about House Thornwood,” I said.

The man whose life I’d saved nodded. He’d been expecting the question.

“The Thornwoods is a House in decline,” he said, and I had to grin. It seemed that there were a number of Houses that could be described as such. “Under the current Count’s leadership, the family has lost most of its productive assets, including a significant amount of land they once held in the South. But they are not without funds. The land was lost to the Count’s greed mixed with a singular lack of ability to farm or cut wood in a profitable manner. He at least had the foresight to sell before losing everything, and the family has been living off the proceeds for the past several years.”

I asked several additional questions and learned that the Count was not well-admired among the staff or other family members, but he still clung to his power with tenacity and an iron first. The few times relatives had schemed to take over the title by encouraging the Count to pass, somehow he’d uncovered the plots before it was too late.

And his response had been savage. He’d made it so that the cousins and nephews responsible for the plot could never engage in such activities again, slitting throats with abandon, and being brutal enough that others were less likely to plot against him themselves.

“So the rest of the Thornwood family has little choice. All they can do is wait for the Count to drop dead of natural causes, and hope that he hasn’t lost so much of the family fortunes that they can never recover.”

On my world, in such cases, a family could declare the patriarch – or matriarch, as the case may be – incompetent, and if the courts could be persuaded to agree, the title would then pass to an heir. But not so in this world, it appeared.

It seemed that Evan was more than happy to be out of Thornwood’s service. “That thing in the market where you stepped in,” Evan continued, “that was one of the Count’s efforts to slow his family’s decline. Aside from the factory, it was his second most lucrative venture. It was also his way of reducing his overhead.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what Evan meant by that, so I sought clarification.

“He still has a large number of staff,” Evan said. “He can’t get away with forgetting to pay us forever, and he’s too proud to release us from our contracts. He doesn’t want to be seen as weak, you see.”

I understood. “So he kills them instead, whenever he has an excuse to do so,” I said. “Publicly, as entertainment. His wage bill gets smaller and he actually earns money in the process.”

Evan nodded. “He has murdered

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